New Harvard Study Replicates Based Researcher’s Findings on Selection for Intelligence in Europeans but Doesn’t Cite Him. Why Not?

Woke academia despises para-academia. Para-academia, after all, challenges the dogmas that many of them rely on to feel that they are morally superior to others and so allay their own insecurities. Such people are, further, heavily invested in Woke academia — their status and even livelihood depends on it — so any challenge to it is extremely dangerous. Therefore, members of para-academia must be suppressed at all costs.

It is difficult to over-emphasise just how strong the Woke grip on academia is. It is so strong that we can essentially make a binary division between “mainstream academia” — that is, almost all universities in Western countries — and para-academia; the scientists and other scholars whose work dares to challenge Woke dogmas. Members of the two groups interact to some extent, as there are still some genuine scientists — who follow data wherever it goes — within mainstream academia and they sometimes collaborate with those outside it. But, often, the truth-seekers who are involved in para-academia — promoting their work on Substack and the like — are considered so toxic that normal scholarly standards are simply eschewed. This happened in April 2026 in what I will call the “Piffer Controversy.”

Davide Piffer is an Italian evolutionary scientist. He researches all manner of “taboo” areas, such as the genetics of race differences in intelligence. One of his studies, for example, has shown that the correlation between national IQs and the prevalence in countries of alleles that are associated with intelligence is 0.9. This finding pretty much proves that genetic differences overwhelmingly explain the IQ differences between countries and, by extension, between ethnic groups and races.

Piffer has pioneered the field of archaeo-genetics. This involves examining samples of ancient genomes and looking for the presence of specific alleles and looking for the extent of alleles that are associated with salient psychological traits such as intelligence, educational attainment, pro-social personality, depression or schizophrenia. In a study in 2024, Piffer demonstrated that European populations had, since the advent of agriculture, been under strong selection for mental stability and intelligence. “What a fascinating finding!” you might think. Mainstream scholars have criticised his methods but, even if these are problematic, Piffer had the original idea of interrogating ancient genomes in this way. Unlike the kinds of people who remain in mainstream academia — where you have to balance originality with conformity in order rise up the hierarchy of the guild — someone like Piffer suffers from no such restrictions and has, therefore, unsurprisingly, come up with a highly original idea.

Move forward two years to 2026 and a team involving David Reich of Harvard University have published a study in Nature — “Ancient DNA reveals pervasive directional selection across West Eurasia” – hailed as ground-breaking and highly original, in which they have shown pretty much exactly what Piffer demonstrated in 2024, albeit using a slightly different methodology. Is Piffer — who, without question, originated the idea of the latest study and got there first — cited or acknowledged in the Nature study? Absolutely not.

Piffer has vociferously complained about this deviation from normal scholarly standards on Twitter and even written to the study’s lead author to demand to know what is going on. Surprisingly, the author responded to Piffer. He admitted to knowing about Piffer’s earlier study but claimed that they didn’t cite it because they thought Piffer’s methodology was faulty. Of course, it couldn’t have been that faulty because it led to pretty much the same results.

“Why would the Reich team behave like this?” you might ask. There are a number of reasons. Woke academia despises para-academia. Para-academia, after all, challenges the dogmas that many of them rely on to feel that they are morally superior to others and so allay their own insecurities. Such people are, further, heavily invested in Woke academia — their status and even livelihood depends on it — so any challenge to it is extremely dangerous. Therefore, members of para-academia must be suppressed at all costs.

This happens in a number of ways. The double-blind anonymous peer-review process of scientific studies is corrupt. A Woke-influenced editor may simply reject a study that challenges Woke dogmas without having it peer-reviewed or even reject it because of the anti-Woke reputation of the authors. If he has some scruples, he may send it out for peer-review, but make sure that one of the two reviewers is very Woke and will definitely reject the study. The psychologist and transsexuality expert Ray Blanchard has called this “Queer Review.” The editor then sides with the negative reviewer and rejects the study.

Even if the study is accepted, you may find interesting details in the reviews. A peer-reviewer once told me not to cite directly relevant work by J. Philippe Rushton because he was “racist.” Another recommended not citing anything from Mankind Quarterly — one of the few academic journals with no Woke influence — because of the journal’s “racist” reputation. Sometimes, these will be conditions of acceptance, not recommendations. And even after the study is published, the publisher may withdraw the paper on spurious grounds — post-publication Queer Review — if enough Woke people get upset about it.

Citing Piffer would potentially have caused “controversy” for Reich and his team, just as The Bell Curve was attacked for its “tainted sources” which included articles published in Mankind Quarterly. These sources were argued to be a problem because, in essence, the studies wouldn’t have been peer-reviewed by proto-Woke dogmatics. If Piffer’s work had been acknowledged in the Nature study, it could’ve been used to smear the research as “racist” and “eugenic.” It is, after all, proving the genetics influencing salient psychological traits and showing that they were strongly selected for among Whites. This is the most charitable possible explanation of the authors’ actions. The Woke-influenced media dared not touch Reich et al.’s important findings; instead going with the finding that ginger hair had been selected for across time.

As I argued in my book The Past is a Future Country, Western academia appears to be in the same situation as it was in the early to mid-nineteenth century. The universities, places of scientific creativity and originality, are the homes to genius-types: autistic, anti-social and, as a result, obsessed with truth above all else. They become prestigious and so attractive to normal intelligent people. These people are socially skilled and conformist: they notice the dominant set of values, understand the benefits of conformity and have what personality psychologists have called the “effortful control” to force themselves to adopt the dominant set of values and then competitively signal them.

They, naturally take over, drive out the genius-types, and turn the university into a branch of that era’s Church. The universities stop producing original research, which is instead found among gentleman scholars, enthusiastic amateurs or in alternative institutions. When English universities were branches of the Church of England (until reforms in 1870), these were the dissenting academies, which focused, unlike the universities, on science. Oxygen was discovered by a lecturer at such an academy.

We have reached this point once again. A dissenter has discovered something very important and it is difficult for the conformists to publicly accept this.